Tuesday, October 25, 2011

SOLD! Minus One Pickup Truck

This is the way you want your Ebay auto auction to end: a phone call from the buyer two minutes after the auction closes and the car being loaded on a trailer 24 hours later.

I listed the '48 pickup on Ebay just over a week ago and it got a LOT of attention... 2827 views, 85 watchers, two bids (one retracted) and a bunch of questions, although most of them came in less than an hour before the end of the auction. (Who waits til the 23rd hour of the ninth day - of a 10 day auction - to ask the seller a question? Sorry I didn't answer, dudes - I didn't even see 'em til the auction was over.)

New owner Ron drove down from the Gold Country this morning to load 'er up. He currently has a small fleet of vintage Mopars, but this is his first Crosley. He told me he'd driven a Crosley exactly once in his life - the memory of piloting a '51 Crosley station wagon on a four lane freeway has haunted him for decades.

Since the auction had gone so smoothly there had to be a wrinkle, and when I went to get the truck out I discovered a flat tire. I grabbed my hand pump to fill it back up, and after putting about eight pounds of air in the tire felt a peculiar 'grab' in the pump. That was the cue that my $70 bike pump had seized up. I could move the truck with one hand when the tires were up, but I could barely manage to push it to the street with the flat. Luckily Ron had a winch for the trailer.

Ron's not sure exactly what he's going to do with the truck. He seemed unfazed by the bodywork it's gonna need, and wondered aloud how a V8-60 would fit in the engine bay, so I suspect the little truck may be in for some extra horsepower at some point.

We got everything loaded up and I waved goodbye as the little truck headed off in the middle of that huge trailer. I can hardly believe that it was only six weeks ago that I was heading to Salt Lake to pick it up, and that I've dragged it over 1000 miles since then. It was all a fun adventure and I'm glad it's off to a good home. With any luck I'll see it at next year's Crosley meet. We'll see.

About Me

I spend somewhere near 40% of my waking hours obsessing over old cars. Usually, this obsessing revolves around an improbable American micro car from the midcentury period-- the Crosley. My fascination began with a quest to strip down my life by driving the world's simplest car.
Turns out that nothing is as simple as it seems.